Fish Stocking & Harvesting
Beautiful Ponds stocks sport fish & “bio-control” fish. Bio-control fish eat unwanted plants & insects such as Hydrilla (underwater weed), algae or mosquitos. Here are a few fish important to stormwater ponds:
Grass carp are the most commonly stocked fish. They control underwater weeds. See Fish That Eat Plants for more information, including a list of plants they eat & won’t eat.
Mosquito fish look like a guppy & are only two inches long, but, ounce for ounce, they are more vicious than any Great White Shark. They ensure that no mosquito larva makes it to adulthood. These effective predators are one of the main tools to reduce mosquito populations around lakes.
Sport fish
Besides solving a specific problem such as reducing Hydrilla without herbicides, fish stocking helps balance the lake ecosystem. It’s important to stock these fish in a certain sequence depending on the current fish populations in your lake. Stocking in the wrong order will triple the cost of stocking.
Harvesting
Sometimes removing fish is an important part of lake management. Two non-native species in particular cause expensive erosion problems. Tilapia & Plecostomus are trouble-makers.
The circles are Tilapia nests. The fish dig these out three times a year, washing the soil out to deeper water. Eventually sandy soil from the bank erodes into the nests that are 10 inches deep. Year by year this moves soil from your back yard to the deeper water.
Harvesting these non-native fish is an important part of lake management. Sometimes installing a protective net over the bottom is required to stop the damage.
Plecostomus dig their nests directly into the bank like an underwater tunnel or mine. A couple dozen of these non-native fish digging tunnels in your back yard isn’t a problem. But when the fish population rises to the thousands, problems arise.
Contact your Beautiful Ponds representative for more information about benefits & problems of fish stocking.